Everything is Backwards – Rethinking the Internet

Pretty much every aspect of the present Internet’s design needs rethinking. It does one thing really well – abstracting away the implementation of connectivity. Everything else is pretty borked from inception.

I have captured a list of the ways in which the Internet can be rethought and redesigned. It is not a comprehensive list, and it is offered without explanation as that would take too long. It should be enough to give you an idea of the scale of the refactoring job we face.

What currently is

What should be

Work conserving queues

Non-work conserving queues

Layered architecture

Scope-based architecture

Global address space

Local address spaces

Emergent performance

Engineered performance

Single class of service

Multiple classes of service

Variable quality floor/ceiling

Fixed quality floor/ceiling available

No association control

Strong association control

Resource rationing

Resource markets

Neutrality regulation

FRAND regulation

Unpredictable performance

Predictable performance

Wide area and LAN only

Works at all scales including personal

Weak abstraction API

Strong abstraction API

No internetwork gateways

Always internetwork gateways

Computer networking paradigm

Inter-process communications paradigm

Job to be done is to deliver packets

Job to be done is to copy information

Quality as a positive phenomenon

Quality as absence of a negative phenomenon

Quantity with a quality

Quantity of quality

Flat and concatenated networks

Recursive networks

Loss is bad and to be avoided

Loss is good and necessary

Over-provision and run links idle

Run in saturation and avoid idleness

Degrees of freedom comingled

Degrees of freedom independent

Running code and consensus

Responsibility for failure

Creating success modes

Containing failure modes

No safety case

Quantified safety case

End-to-end principle

Science and engineering

No real underlying theory

Strong mathematical basis

Unknown scaling limits

Known scaling limits

Connectivity as first class design object

Connectivity, security, performance as first class design objects

Distributed applications as afterthought

Distributed applications as integral capability

Composable connectivity

Composable connectivity, security and performance

No or weak isolation

Strong security and performance isolation

Unbounded applied load

Bounded applied load

No agreed resource model

Agreed resource model

No standardised units of demand and supply

Standardised units of demand and supply

Centralised addressing governance

Decentralised addressing governance

Naming and addressing confused and conflated

Naming and addressing clearly and cleanly separated

Domain names as address macros

Resource identifier databases

Mobility as afterthought

Mobile by design

Network protocol monoculture

Network protocol diversity

Low cohesion and strong coupling

High cohesion and loose coupling

Fragile

Antifragile

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I am an expert on the telecommunications business. I help senior executives to make sense of what is happening, anticipate what is coming, and to act decisively in the face of uncertainty. My long-term professional goal is to facilitate three paradigm shifts: for data networking to become a true science; for voice to evolve its own native form of hypermedia; and for cloud-based enterprises to have the most efficient and effective possible means to communicate with their customers - Martin Geddes. Contact us here